Not to Be a Dweeb, O.E.D. Takes on New Words

By ELEANOR BLAU

Published: November 30, 1991

Dweebs and dinks have made it, and woopies are in as well. They are among more than 2,000 words and phrases that have come into wide use since 1980 and that have been enshrined -- at least for now -- in the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, a 322-page volume being published on Thursday by the Oxford University Press.

More than half are American, with subjects from drugs to business, health to music. Tiny drawings indicate the field of each entry: a tree for the environment, a computer terminal for science and technology, an explosion for war and weapons.

This is the first such work by Oxford. Unlike the revered O.E.D. -- Oxford English Dictionary -- the new book goes beyond etymology, reporting cultural changes that prompted this or that coinage.

Take "woopie," a "yuppie"-inspired nickname for a well-off older person. Woopies have been on the increase in Western societies, the dictionary notes, hence their significance as consumers. In fact, they rate other entries: You can also call them "glams" (graying leisured affluent middle-aged) or "zuppies" (zestful upscale people in their prime).

"Dink" also has market potential, denoting double (or dual) income no kids.

Not so "dweeb," whose sound somehow suggests its meaning: "a contemptible or boring person, especially one who is studious, puny or unfashionable," probably influenced, the dictionary says, by "dwarf, weed, creep, etc." A Snapshot of an Age

Perhaps half the new words will wind up added to the next edition of the O.E.D., said Sara Tulloch, editor of the new work. A quarter of them are there already (including AIDS, crack and bad-mouth), in the 20-volume second edition published in 1989. The rest may just be passing fashion, she said.

"The best one can hope to do in a book of this kind," Mrs. Tulloch notes in a preface to the new dictionary, "is to take a snapshot of the words and senses which seem to characterize our age and which a reader in 50 or a hundred years' time might be unable to understand fully (even if these words were entered in standard dictionaries) without a more expansive explanation of their social, political or cultural context."

Never mind how low-brow. Oxford presents words in use without judging their esthetics, said Mrs. Tulloch, a 37-year-old managing editor at Oxford Dictionaries who selected the new words and wrote all 750 articles about them. Still, she admits to wincing at a few.

"Gobsmacked," for instance. ("In British slang: astounded, flabbergasted; speechless or incoherent with amazement; overawed," the new dictionary reports.) "I just don't like the sound and look of it," she said.

She more readily recalled words she fancied, especially those that condense cleverly. Like "affluenza," which telescopes "affluence" and "influenza" to evoke the malaise of wealthy people.

"I like to think that in some way the book is a celebration of wit and inventiveness," she said the other day.

She was in town to promote the book. She lives in Oxford and is married to a copy editor, who has caught some of the new words slipping into her conversation. They have an 8-year-old daughter.

Mrs. Tulloch majored in modern languages and law at the University of Surrey. She speaks Russian, French and Latvian and was working on a doctorate on new Latvian words when she returned to her mother tongue, joining Oxford Dictionaries in 1985 to work on the O.E.D.'s second edition.

Preparing for her New Words dictionary, which took a year to write, she read appraisals of the 1980's to get a feel for the decade, then searched the files and data bases of the O.E.D.

Some 1,000 words were obvious choices, while others needed more research, she said. She enlisted the efforts of the dictionary department's insatiable reading teams: people in Britain and the United States who, she said, "read everything from the gutter press to prestigious Sunday papers, from pulp fiction to literary prize-winners." One Dead-End Detour

And she did research of her own. For instance, on "cowabunga," which youngsters may think of as the rallying cry of Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles but which turns out to have begun with "The Howdy Doody Show" of the 1950's. "By the 60's, it had entered surfing slang as a cry of exhilaration when riding the crest of a wave," the dictionary reports.

Mrs. Tulloch had had the interesting notion that the expression originated in New South Wales, but that turned out to be wrong, she said. It seems that "kauwul" is an aboriginal word for "big," and "bong" for "death" and "gubba" for "good." But this is "surely no more than a curious coincidence," she notes in the dictionary.

It would be nerkish (probably formed from "nerd" and "jerk") to read straight through from "AAA (see Triple A)" to "zygote intra-fallopian transfer (see zift)." Some form of organized browsing might be preferable.

For example, Mrs. Tulloch said, some of her friends have reaped literary dividends by scanning just the business items that are scattered through the book: "It reads like a medieval romance, with a triple witching hour, and baddies called arbs who go round body-snatching and carrying out hostile takeovers and insider trading. There are companies with a Pac-Man strategy, where you turn around and gobble up the company that's trying to gobble you. Or they take a poison pill or send out a shark repellent. Until a white knight comes along on his charger and saves the company."

Surely, words were being invented and catching on even as she spoke. So it seemed reasonable that Mrs. Tulloch expressed hope for a successor book before the century ends. "I think it might be nice to have them every five years," she said.

Photo: An excerpt from the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, a 322-page volume that is the first such work by the Oxford University Press.